


Fake Palindromes

by nonelvis



Series: Across the Universe [2]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-23
Updated: 2009-11-23
Packaged: 2017-10-03 15:25:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonelvis/pseuds/nonelvis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She's so like his Ace, and yet so different.</i> The duplicate Doctor meets the parallel universe version of an old companion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fake Palindromes

**Author's Note:**

> Written for an old Handy/Ace prompt on the anonmeme. Title stolen from Andrew Bird.

The Doctor's mobile rings, chiming bells that jolt him from a sound sleep. The phone keeps chiming, five, then six times, then quiets.

A few minutes later, the phone begins to ring again, and the Doctor abandons all hope of a lazy Saturday morning in bed, eating pancakes with Rose, or possibly _on_ Rose. He jabs at the phone and hears, "Doctor? There's something here in the quarry. We need you right away."

Rose snuffles, kicks him gently, then turns over, burying herself in the blankets.

He kisses her goodbye on the forehead before leaving. Pancakes tomorrow, perhaps. With extra butter.

  
* * *

The quarry is Torchwood's proving ground, its granite walls streaked from drilling machines and pockmarked from bomb shrapnel. The Doctor leaves his car on one of the ridges and makes his way down a wide gravel path to a small cluster of soldiers.

The one who greets him, Sergeant Parker, is square-jawed and muscular, with black combat fatigues and a clipped voice. His grip when they shake hands is rough and a little painful.

"We were testing some new ordnance. We set off the explosion there," he says, pointing towards a flat, sandy part of the quarry that looks exactly the same to the Doctor as all the other flat, sandy parts. "This new stuff packs a hell of a wallop. The vibrations shifted a bunch of rocks over there on the side, and that's when we started picking up the signal."

He starts walking the Doctor towards the control hut set up on the opposite side of the quarry from the rockfall. The whitewashed cinderblocks gleam in the early-morning sunshine.

"The signal's regular as you please," Parker continues. "We're hoping you can make something of it, and soon. We've got a schedule to keep. Though personally," he adds, chuckling, "I think Doctor McShane just likes blowing stuff up, same as the rest of us."

It takes a moment for the Doctor to process these two data points: a scientist named McShane, who happens to like explosions. He pauses at the entrance to the control room, his hand on the sun-warmed door lever.

Common name, McShane. Could be an older man, grizzled and grey, with stretched and fading tattoos along his forearms. Could be a speccy bloke like him, with clipboard and reverse Polish notation calculator at the ready. It doesn't have to be her.

But it is.

  
* * *

Ace is older and leaner and even harder-edged than he remembers, but of course she's not really his Ace. For all he knows she isn't haunted by the ghosts of Perivale, and certainly not the secrets he kept from her.

"About time you got here," she says, shaking hands with the Doctor. "Doctor Dorothy McShane, weapons research and development."

"The Doctor," he replies, "but you can call me Pr– ... you can call me the Doctor."

She gives him a funny sideways look, then motions towards the shortwave. "We scan the shortwave bands during demolition tests to look for interference. After the last explosion, we started to hear this."

She flips a switch on the radio, which hums and crackles and suddenly emits a sharp stream of tweedles and chirps, like the chattering of alien sparrows. The pattern rises an octave, then cascades back down, the sequence repeating every twenty seconds.

The Doctor tilts his head, concentrating. It's a language he hasn't heard for hundreds of years, and even a brain as big as his forgets things after that long, especially when his brain isn't even fully _his_ anymore. But a few minutes later, he has it.

"It's an Axtalpa distress call," he says. "Have you traced the source? It's probably near that rockfall."

"It is." She crosses her arms and jerks her head towards Parker, who's standing at attention near the door. "But Sergeant Protocol over there wouldn't let me take a look without calling in Xenology."

"Standard procedure –" Parker begins.

The Doctor whirls towards the soldier and cuts him off. "There could be injured people in there! Get them out!" He glares at Parker until the man disappears through the door, then follows, looking back at Ace.

"Well?"

She's out the door almost as quickly as he is, and he smiles to himself when she passes.

  
* * *

But in the end, there are no people to rescue. There are rocks so heavy they need a backhoe to move them; and there is brownish, metallic-tasting grit choking their breath; and there are three shrivelled bodies clustered around a blinking transmitter and a dusty, pathetic bag of belongings.

Ace and the Doctor stand quietly, watching as the soldiers carry out the bodies and carefully zip them into the olive green bags Torchwood's emergency services staff have provided. When the last bag is safely locked away for transport, Ace re-ties her sweaty hair into a ponytail and marches back towards the hut.

"Where are you going?" the Doctor asks, confused.

"Show's over. Time to get back to work." The door slams behind her.

  
* * *

Strictly speaking, the Doctor is not in charge of Torchwood's Xenology team, or even a Torchwood employee. He is a consultant, because Pete recognised immediately that he wouldn't follow anyone's orders, not even Rose's. The fact that the team has no official manager, and that everyone treats the Doctor as if Xenology were his personal fiefdom, makes his status a technicality, but an important one, at least to him.

If he were a Torchwood employee, someone could make him share the aftermath of the Axtalpa discovery: analysing the transmitter and the contents of the bag, examining the bodies to determine cause of death. Instead, he holes up in his office early Monday morning with the artefacts and leaves the autopsy to the biology experts. It should do them some good to examine once-living alien tissue, since most of what they've had to practise on is Cybermen, and he can look forward to reviewing their hilariously inaccurate theories about the functions of different organs.

The transmitter is simple enough, an off-the-shelf unit that can broadcast in eighty-five unique languages and another thirty-three dialects, but ironically, given its purpose, wasn't known for its reliability. Its battery packs are full enough, and the dead bodies old enough, that the Doctor quickly determines the transmitter had been off for some time before the rockfall knocked about its internal mechanisms in just the right way to restart the failed distress call.

He puts it aside in favour of the bag, which at first is no less depressing than the transmitter. It contains empty water and ration packs; several jars of withered, crumbling plant samples; and a hand-held map device he could probably sonic back to life if he needed to.

But what finally grabs his attention, and keeps him cloistered in the office for the rest of the day, is a small book with a burgundy binding and a gold stamp on the cover in Axtalpa so faded he can barely read it.

It says _Journal_.

  
* * *

The early pages of the journal describe the Axtalpa's initial explorations of Earth, their excitement at discovering new plant and animal species, the joy and wonder of setting foot on unfamiliar ground far from home.

Near the end of the journal, the graceful strokes and serifs of the handwriting on the early pages begin to disintegrate into something more angular and spidery, and the text grows more uncertain:

_I fear these are our last hours of breath. _

_We have travelled so far from home, only to die in this foreign place, far from the gods, and from everyone we know._

_We have been –_

A knock on the door startles the Doctor so much he nearly jumps out of his chair, but he invites the visitor in anyway.

It's Ace – no, Dorothy, he reminds himself, not necessarily Ace. Not necessarily any nickname at all, much less the one burnt into him.

Dorothy is dressed casually in a black blouse, dark jeans, and motorcycle boots, and strides into his office with confidence. She drops into the chair across from the Doctor's desk and leans back, her fingers steepled together.

"Nice digs," she says. "They gave you windows. Perks of sleeping with the boss' daughter, I guess."

"I like to look out at the sky," he says carefully.

She nods towards the Axtalpa artefacts on his desk. "How's it going? Find anything good?"

The Doctor wipes his eyes. "Not much, really. I can tell you they were trapped in a cave-in, oh, about forty years ago. And I can tell you that their transmitter's a dodgy bit of work they should never have been using in the first place. It probably had a loose connection, and the rockfall jarred it back to life."

"So, we couldn't have saved anyone even if we'd gone in sooner."

"No, I'm afraid we couldn't have."

"That's a relief." Dorothy slides forward and rests her chin on her palms. "Look, I'm sorry I was kind of rough out there. We'd been planning these trials for months, and we were on a tight schedule. And ... I'm not so good with dead people."

"Not many of us are."

"Yeah, but I should have been more helpful," she says. "I wanted to be more helpful." She pauses, shifts in the chair, then finally gets up. "Anyway, just came to apologise, and see what you'd found." Tilts her head, nodding towards the journal. "What's that?"

"Come and have a look." He motions her over behind the desk, and she runs a finger lightly over the journal's pages, tracing the letterforms.

"Is this their writing? It's beautiful. All those little triangles and spikes, like, what's that ancient language ... cuneiform?"

"Very much like that," he agrees.

She settles back against his desk, her thigh brushing the arm of his chair. "Where'd you learn to read this?"

The Doctor pauses. Only a trusted few people at Torchwood know his origins. Even the Xenology team thinks he's simply an eccentric, obsessive polymath, which isn't terribly far from the truth, but still omits an essential fact.

"Oh ... here and there," he evades. "Tablets. Artefacts. I'm good with languages."

She nods. "What's it say?"

"Well, the early bits are all about exploring Earth. They ate themselves sick on wild raspberries the first week, and they were a bit scared of dogs at first. Oh! And we were shorter than they expected, and we smell funny to them, sort of alkaline. But I'm getting near the end now. They're afraid of dying so far away from their homeworld. They think they're being ..."

The last part of the sentence is smudged. He has to lean closer to read it and make sure he's picking out the word breaks correctly.

"Ah," he finally says when he identifies the words, and tries not to let their irony stab at him too deeply. "It says, 'We have been punished for our recklessness.'"

"Awfully hard on themselves, weren't they?"

"Probably. They were just explorers, doing their jobs. Sometimes bad things happen."

Dorothy pushes herself off the desk and heads for the door. "I'd better get back to work. More tests next month, and I've got loads of fine-tuning to do."

"Doctor McShane – are you sure you don't want to stay and hear some more? The rest of it is much less depressing, I promise."

"Love to, but can't." She pauses in the doorway. "And call me 'Ace,' okay? 'Doctor McShane' is for the soldiers and my staff."

"Ace," he repeats. His heart soars. "'Ace' it is."

  
* * *

Over a late dinner of tortellini with pesto, the Doctor asks Rose what she knows about Ace.

"McShane?" she says. "Really good at her job, brilliant weapons designer. That massive anti-Dalek gun I had when I crossed dimensions? That was hers."

"You ever spend any time with her? What's she like?"

Rose spears some pasta with her fork, taps it against the plate. "Keeps to herself, mostly. Why do you ask?"

He chews. It's easier than answering, but Rose is far too familiar with his habits.

"Okay," she begins. "You can clam up if you like. Just blink once for 'she's got something in her lab I'd like to nick,' twice for 'I fancy her a bit,' and three times for 'she called me a prat the other day, and I probably deserved it.'"

He stares at her, unblinking.

"Is that 'none of the above'?" Rose asks.

"It's 'I think you've finally gone round the bend.'"

"Nah, you've known that for ages."

"True enough." He takes another bite. "She ... she reminds me of someone I used to know, that's all."

"She reminds you of someone you used to know."

"Yeah."

"You mean, she _is_ someone you used to know."

Rose is definitely too familiar with his habits. Maybe he should acquire some new ones, just to keep her on her toes.

"Yes," he admits. "Someone I used to travel with."

Rose purses her lips and stabs another piece of pasta, the tines of her fork clinking hard on the plate.

"Not like that!" he protests. "We were never – we would never have –"

"Sorry. That's not what I meant." Rose puts down her fork and pushes the plate away, sighing. "Well, maybe a little."

"Rose, I know she's not my Ace."

"But you wish she was, don't you?" Rose says, gently touching his hand.

He clasps her hand in return, and doesn't reply.

  
* * *

The Axtalpa resurface a few days later, when the dodgy transmitter unexpectedly crackles to life in the Doctor's office, disturbing his intense paper-clip target practise.

_Distress call acknowledged – cargo transport Minax responding._

"I turned you off!" he exclaims, then rushes to the transmitter. Its status lights flicker feebly while the message repeats, and finally sputter out before it can broadcast a third time. He curses the manufacturer, who not only doomed the Axtalpa, but is now providing rescue far too late.

He's in the midst of dialling Rose's extension to see if she's up for a trip when he remembers she's running training exercises in Cardiff today, and he replaces the phone in its cradle with a twinge of disappointment.

Still, if Rose can't join him, someone else might. Someone else who could use a chance to greet the universe when it comes knocking on the door.

  
* * *

"Transporting three dead aliens for an hour and a half on a hot day when I should be running tests," Ace says when they arrive at the quarry. "I must like you a lot."

"I've got a magnetic personality. Ask anyone," he replies with a cheeky grin. "Anyway, you wanted to meet some aliens, didn't you?"

"I've met aliens," Ace says. "Why d'you think I do what I do?"

"Not all aliens want to take over the Earth, you know," says the Doctor. "There are thousands of peaceful races out there."

"And how exactly would you know?"

The Doctor stops the van abruptly, sending Ace and himself lurching towards the windscreen. "The same way I know that ship shouldn't be there," he says, pointing to what looks like a massive and exceptionally craggy boulder looming over a small, rectilinear spacecraft. "I've met more alien races than you could possibly imagine. Part-alien myself, as a matter of fact, not that Rose and I like to let that little fact slip out, Torchwood's mission being what it is. Now, those aliens, there, they're called the Sycorax; I've met them before, Christmas Day a few years past. Ah, but that's a whole other universe ago." He finishes with a sigh and turns to Ace, who's staring at him wide-eyed with surprise. "Come on! Time to meet the neighbours!"

"You're part-alien," she says slowly.

"Yes. Long story, that. Long, and not terribly funny, now that I think about it. Usually these sorts of stories are, but not this one." He touches her shoulder lightly for reassurance, and though she flinches for a moment, she doesn't pull away. "Ace. I'm still me. And if you're ... well, if you're you, there's something in that bag you're carrying that we might need before we're through."

Her eyes flick down at the shoulder bag between her feet, and she starts to smile. "Hostile aliens, did you say?"

"Could be, Ace. Could be." And they're out of the car in a flash.

  
* * *

By the time they've made it to the quarry basin, the Sycorax crew have the Axtalpa cowering at swordpoint in the dirt, kneeling with their small grey hands held high. The Sycorax at the centre of the group flicks his energy whip at random spots distressingly near his captives, who flinch whenever the weapon cuts close to their bodies.

"Hello there!" the Doctor calls out cheerfully. "Nice day for a bit of piracy, isn't it?"

The aliens all turn to look at him, but none respond.

"Oh, right, the language barrier," he says. "And here I've gone and wasted a perfectly good entrance. Ace, better pull out your translator if you'd like to follow along."

He continues, switching into a standard galactic language both alien races should understand. "Now, as I was saying, my friend Ace and I are here to meet these fine people you seem to be threatening. Care to tell me why?"

The Sycorax captain cracks his whip at the Axtalpa again, and laughs at the Doctor, deep and throaty. "Little human, this does not concern you. Go home, before we kill you as well."

"Kill us? That doesn't seem very nice of you. Not very nice at all, is it, Ace?"

"Nope, not at all," she echoes, sliding her hand into a side pocket of her bag.

The Doctor steps closer to the Sycorax, just out of reach of their weapons, but near enough to intimidate. "This is your only warning. Whatever you're trying to steal or extort from these people, let it go and leave now."

"And why should we do that, little human?"

The Doctor moves even closer, now only a couple of steps away from the captain, looking him directly in the eye. "Because my colleague here is about to blow up your aft plasma vent – that little nook on the left, Ace – and after that, you'll have about ten minutes to get your ship back into space before it's so disabled it never lifts off again."

A small metal canister shoots over his head and bounces exactly where it's supposed to, into a miniature canyon on the Sycorax ship.

"You might want to cover your ears for this part," he says.

The Sycorax limp back into the air five minutes later.

  
* * *

The Doctor and Ace lean against the side of the van, watching the Axtalpa depart with the bodies of their brethren. Ace cranes her neck, shading her eyes with her hand while she tracks the ship in the sky, a pewter rectangle that shrinks into a dot as it rises, eventually winking out of sight completely.

"You were right. They were fine people," she says. "Shame we had to tell them they were forty years too late."

"At least the bodies are on their way home now for a proper burial. Back to their families, everyone they knew."

Ace scuffs her boots on the gritty quarry floor. "You didn't have permission to give them those bodies, did you?"

"Permission? To give the Axtalpa their people's bodies back?"

"Torchwood found them, on Torchwood property. That makes them ..."

"... the Axtalpa's. Not Torchwood's. Not ever." The Doctor folds his arms over his chest and turns towards Ace. "How would you feel if I stole your mother's body and wouldn't give it back?"

"My mother's body?" Ace snorts. "Good question. But I see your point."

"You humans aren't alone in this universe. You should remember that. Treat others with a bit of kindness now and then."

"Oh, really? What about those other ones, the Syco-whatsits? What would they have done to the Axtalpa if I hadn't had the nitro? What would they have done to the rest of us?" Ace's eyes narrow. "And what about you, Doctor?"

"Me? I'm harmless enough."

"Is that why you haven't told anyone you're part-alien?"

He sighs and wipes his face with his hand. "Ace, if the rest of Torchwood knew, they'd lock me up on general principle."

Ace scowls, kicking at the dust again, but her lips slowly curve upwards into a cocky grin. "If they did that, you wouldn't be able to take me out on your illicit rendezvous with alien spacecraft, now, would you?"

He grins back at her. "Interested in some more field work, Doctor McShane?"

"Depends. Got anything else that needs blowing up?"

He shakes his head, chuckling, and opens the driver's side door. "With you around? I think I can guarantee that."

  
* * *

She's so like his Ace, and yet so different. Same hair pulled back in a ponytail, same self-confident flippancy, same button nose he yearns to press, though this Ace would probably break his finger if he tried that. She won't tell him how she acquired the crosshatched scars on her left hand, but Rose told him rumour has it Ace survived a trip into a cyberconversion booth thanks to malfunctioning earpods and a length of iron piping.

Whenever he sees her, he recalls a past that was his, yet wasn't, and was never hers. Nostalgia aches where a second heart once beat. He can, and does, share stories with Rose, but Rose knows what it's like to travel with him; Ace doesn't, and never will.

The Doctor meets her in her lab one day, fifteen floors below his office in a sub-basement dedicated to her research, all super-reinforced concrete and massive metal doors.

"Finally decided to see where the real work is done, did you?" she jokes. "Come on, I'll show you what I've been up to."

She guides him to a storage room in the corner. It's full of aluminium canisters, each in its own cushioned cradle.

"Nitro-19," she says. "Feels like I've been working on this one for ages, but it's finally ready for testing."

"This isn't what you used on the Sycorax? Or that Tarvid nest we found?"

"Nah, it wasn't ready then. But you remember those deactivated Cybermen you told me about last week?"

"Rose told me she and her team ... ." He nods as the realisation dawns. "She told me she blew them up."

Ace grins at him. "Thanks to a very small sample batch I gave her. Perfectly safe, don't worry! Unless you're a Cyberman."

"You've got a remarkable talent for destruction, Doctor McShane."

"Don't I know it." She pokes him playfully in the chest. "Come with me to the tests tomorrow. You can see the nitro in action for yourself."

"Oh, you don't need me there," he says. "You can handle this on your own. You're so good at this, Ace, like I always kn– ... like I always heard you were."

She drops her eyes, suddenly bashful. "Look ... it's meant a lot to me, getting out in the field with you. Most times I'm better off in the lab. So I want to thank you, especially because – " She pauses, clearly reconsidering her sentence, then brightens again. "Please come tomorrow, won't you? Please?"

How many times had he indulged her over the years? There were certainly moments when no matter how earnestly she'd begged for something, he'd refused her; but what she wants now, it's a small and simple thing, just the gift of time spent with him. And what kind of Time Lord would he be, halfway or otherwise, if he can't grant her that?

  
* * *

The launcher spits out its last canister of nitro-19, which disintegrates in a spectacular ball of flame and smoke in the centre of the quarry. In the bunker, the seismograph needle chatters quietly, scratching several swift peaks across the paper.

"Off the _charts!_" Ace yells, whooping with glee, ripping the paper out of the machine and waving it like a victory flag. She flings her arms around the Doctor, and he responds in kind, swaying on his feet, swinging her around.

And then, when he starts to let go, she kisses him. Not shy, not hesitant; just hard pressure on his lips and a soft tongue slipping into his mouth and her scarred hand reaching down to cup his arse and pull his hips close. She tugs harder, wriggling backwards until she's sitting on the edge of the table and he's got his arms braced on either side of her thighs.

She breaks the kiss first. The few brain cells he has that aren't completely overwhelmed by what has happened begin to transmit a message: _this is a very bad idea._

Ace just smiles and says "Wicked." Then she kisses him again, at least until more brain cells join the chorus, and he pulls away.

"Ace, we can't. I can't. It's not that you're not ... and it's not that I don't, because I do, and I shouldn't, and I never did, and maybe that's why ... and Rose will _kill_ me ... and ... ." His fingers comb through his hair, and Ace, Ace is still sitting there, bemused and serene.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. You've got someone, and my timing's rotten. Always is for this kind of thing." She hops off the desk, steps close to him again, lets one hand dance lightly on his hipbone. "Sometimes you get so lonely, you just don't care."

Ace's other hand drifts across his belly, down lower until she's stroking him through his trousers, once, twice, again, and he closes his eyes and groans. _This is not your Ace. This is not –_ but of course she isn't, because his Ace would never have done these things, and he wouldn't have succumbed.

He lets Ace guide him back to the desk and pull him down on top of her.

Ace has never been patient. She kisses him forcefully and moves his fingers directly to the button of her jeans; when the Doctor takes his time about unfastening it, she does it for him. His mouth slides from hers, trailing kisses across her cheek and jawline, down the lines of her throat, where he can feel her moans hum and vibrate on his lips. Soon she's bucking against his hand and whimpering in his ear, soft whispers he'd never have expected to hear from her, until at last he feels her collapse in his arms, breathing one long, deep sigh.

The timbre of that sigh splashes over him like ice water. That is not the cry he's drawn from Rose in the dark so many times before. That is not Rose's voice. That is not Rose on the desk, with his hand still buried in her underwear.

That isn't even his Ace.

The Doctor wrests himself free without apology and runs, trainers crunching in the ochre dust of the quarry, up the steep slope to the car park.

He sits alone in the car, unable to decide whether he should take care of that painful hardness in his trousers himself, or whether it's the just punishment for what he's done. Eventually, the steady wilting decides the question for him, and he drives home with an empty stare and a single, remorseful heart.

  
* * *

He makes love to Rose that night with energy and fury that leaves them both drenched in sweat and gasping for breath.

Afterwards, she curls in a ball beside him, her index finger drawing trails in the moisture on his chest.

"That was _amazing_," she says. "Well, more amazing than usual, I mean."

The Doctor reaches down to stroke Rose's hair. "Had a long day today. I think I missed you."

"Did you, now?" She peers up at him.

He keeps stroking her hair, but doesn't meet her eyes.

"Yeah," he replies. "I missed you."

  
* * *

Three days pass before he checks his missed call log to see how many times Ace has telephoned him, which is twice, and texted him, which is also twice. The first voice and text messages both say the same thing: _call me._ She never left a second voice message, just the click of her mobile and a text reading _don't be a wanker about this._

After another week, there are two more texts: _going to quarry – come blow stuff up with me_ and _you really are a wanker._

And finally, five days after that: _i'm sorry._

It takes a full two weeks before he's ready to descend to her basement lair, even if he's still not certain what he wants to say to her himself. An apology, definitely, though Emily Post, to the best of his knowledge, never addressed the delicate issue of how one apologises for running out on the lover you shouldn't have had in the first place. An explanation, perhaps, if he can figure out how to tell her exactly who she once was to him, and yet never was, at least in this universe.

The lift doors open, and for a moment he's frozen inside the car, unable to take those last few steps to the lab. But he wakes just as the doors begin to glide shut, and bangs them back with both hands, bulling his way into the lab while he still has the courage to do this.

All of Ace's assistants are there, measuring, pipetting, typing inscrutable formulae into their laptops. But Ace herself is not.

Her chief researcher, a slim man named George with trim grey beard and hair, notices him and his agitation at the door. The Doctor has always liked George and his forthrightness, the calmness he has in dealing with prickly Ace.

George, clutching a binder to his chest like a security blanket, walks over to greet him, but wastes no time on pleasantries.

"You're not looking for Doctor McShane, are you?"

"Isn't she in today?"

"She didn't tell you?" George says. "She's on sabbatical. Left just the other day."

The Doctor's jaw goes slack. "What?"

"She won a visiting scientist appointment at MIT earlier this year. She had to leave this week to be there for the new term." George hugs the binder to himself a little more tightly. "She really didn't tell you?"

"N– oh, of course she did. I must have forgotten. Silly me, came all the way down here when I should have texted her."

"Right, then," George says, brightening. "Anything I can help you with while you're here?"

The Doctor shakes his head and retreats to the lift. He passed the point of help far too long ago.

  
* * *

He mopes in his usual distracted way, streaks of moody silence cracking through his manic soliloquies. Rose notices. She's good at that, always has been; but at the moment, she's also a bitter reminder of the reason he's here instead of somewhere else. Not that there's anywhere else he'd want to be without her, and he kicks himself further for even contemplating such a thing.

"I'm sorry she left," Rose says. "She'll be back in a year. And anyway, you know how to get in touch with her. Stop being such an idiot."

As if she has any idea just how much of an idiot he is.

He caves, and calls Ace anyway.

  
* * *

"Didn't think I'd be hearing from you again anytime soon," Ace says when she answers his call.

"Yes. Well." He fidgets with the phone, moving it to his left ear, then back to his right. "How's America?"

"The usual. Funny accents, rubbish tea. _Terrific_ telly. They've got this programme with these _really_ big trucks –"

"The one with the obstacle course? And the women in sparkly bikinis?"

"That's the one," Ace laughs, then adds, still cheerful, "Now, don't even try to tell me you're calling to talk about telly."

"No. No, I suppose I'm not."

Her voice softens. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you I was leaving. But we were having such a good time, I didn't want to spoil it. And then after that day ... I didn't get the feeling you wanted to talk to me."

"Ace ... ." Talking, he thinks. They used to do so much of that, him circling around her, her jabbing back, hoping for a direct hit.

"Of course I wanted to talk to you. All those things I never said ... but it's hard to explain," he finally finishes.

"No, it isn't. I thought we were friends. I thought you liked me. And you just ran away, like I was nothing."

"You're not nothing, Ace." He recalls a long-ago day near a battlefield, telling her, _Aces are rare._

"Well, then, what was it? Suddenly remembered you had a girlfriend? Because that didn't seem to stop you."

He rubs his eyes, leans closer to his desk, curling inwards. "You've no idea the sort of things I remember. The sort of memories I have, the things I've done I've tried to forget. So many things I should have fixed."

"Everyone makes mistakes, Doctor."

"Not just mistakes. I've made a lot of decisions in my life. Far too many of them. Some I didn't have the right to make."

"I get it," Ace says tightly. "Why'd you even bother calling, then?"

"You don't understand – it's more complicated than that –"

"No," she replies, cool and crisp. "It really isn't."

"Yes, it really is," he snaps, and cringes at his own harshness. "I pushed you – over and over again, where I thought you should go, trying to make you into who you needed to be. And I wondered sometimes, after you left, whether I'd got it wrong, because I'm never wrong. Well, mostly never wrong. Not entirely wrong there either, even if you were angry with me. And then I ended up here, and you were here too, and you're everything I could have wished for, and I ... I let that get the better of me."

There's a long pause on the other end, almost as long as his monologue, certainly long enough for him to worry that the call has been dropped. "Ace?" he asks, tentative.

"I'm still here, you nutter," she answers. "Mind you, I've no idea _why_."

"I did say it was complicated."

"You got that right."

"I can explain. If there's one thing I can do, actually, it's explain."

"Another time, maybe."

"Ace ..."

"I'll call you, okay?" She's quiet again for a moment. "I just need to sort things out on my own first."

"I understand," says the Doctor. His fingers clench the mobile's casing until it creaks. "Take as much time as you need."

"Goodbye, Doctor," Ace says.

There's a crackle on the line, and a click. And then silence.

  
* * *

At this hour of the night, a half-moon the sole light source, the edge of the quarry cliff is visible only in negative, scrub brush and stones marking charcoal smudges upon the impenetrable blackness of the quarry basin.

The Doctor steps out of the car, a metal canister in his hand. He's twisted the nozzle as far as it will go, which gives him thirty seconds. One more of the differences between this model of Ace and the original: this universe's Ace perfected her timer mechanisms.

Based on the farthest tufts of grass he can see, there's only about twenty metres separating him from the sheer drop. He can't be certain without moving closer. Ace would appreciate the danger, he thinks.

He starts to run.

There isn't time to build up much speed before he's going to have to slow down or plunge to his death, a real one this time. But he runs anyway, each breath full and exhilarating, the only sounds his trainers slapping against the earth, and the chirping of lonely crickets.

He skids to a halt just a few steps shy of the edge, his right arm windmilling around to hurl the canister as high as he can over the great dark pit, and he waits.

Waits some more, counting seconds off in his head. _Four. Three. Two._ Sucking in his breath and holding it at _One._

The canister bursts open, flames budding round it in a sphere. A yellow-orange corona of light haloes across the quarry, spreading itself out to the edges and dissolving into darkness.

The Doctor stands and watches.

The burn mushrooms up and out, then begins its slow fizzle and fade into pale puffs of smoke, and finally into sparks and embers that tumble like rainfall to the ground below. Haze drifts across the quarry basin, wrapping him in its sharp chemical smell.

At last, there's no trace of the explosion, not even the faintest acrid scent, everything borne away by a breeze.

But he stands, and waits anyway, and hopes.


End file.
